Back in April 2019, we wrote an article titled, “Why Aren’t Women-Led Startups Getting More Funding?” The article was about a woman-owned startup based in San Francisco and how the founder linked her inability to raise enough funding to her gender. However, women-led startups are creating more jobs than ever. In 2017 alone, for example, more than 1.1 million women-led businesses generated nearly $1.5 billion in revenue and created more than 10 million jobs across the United States.
According to new research from Columbia Business School, female-led ventures are disproportionately overlooked by venture capitalists at multiple stages of the entrepreneurship pipeline. Researchers from Columbia Business School and London Business School show that businesses led by women are 63 percent less likely to obtain venture capital (VC) funding than those led by me. Now, Google is trying to change it.
Today, Google announced the launch of a new accelerator program focused on women founders in the United States and Canada. The announcement of the initial Startup’s first Women Founders accelerator cohort comes less than three months after Google announced its plan to launch a new accelerator program focused on women-led tech startups and women founders in Canada and the United States.
After receiving almost 1,000 applications, below are the 12 tech startups chosen to participate in the inaugural cohort of women entrepreneurs :
- Coconut Software (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) provides customer engagement solutions that modernize how banks and credit unions engage, creating a streamlined experience for both staff and customers.
- COI Energy (Tampa, Florida) brings together utilities and businesses to detect and eliminate energy waste in buildings to optimize the electric grid—creating a climate-friendly economy.
- CultivatePeople‘s (Arlington, Virginia) compensation software, Kamsa, provides global market compensation data and helps companies make data-driven pay decisions, helping eliminate pay gaps.
- CurieAI (Santa Clara, California) transforms care for respiratory illnesses like asthma and COPD through AI-based models that help physicians understand respiratory health, disease progression, and treatment effectiveness at an individualized and population level.
- Fairygodboss (New York City, New York) is the largest career community for women in the U.S. It provides free resources like career connections, job listings, virtual recruiting events, community advice, and the hard-to-find information about how companies treat women.
- Heirlume (Hamilton, Ontario) makes trademark registration as easy and accessible as domain registration by providing the first self-serve professional-quality trademark search and application platform.
- Kapwing (San Francisco, California) enables digital storytelling for creative teams and professionals via an online image, video, and GIF editing platform.
- Livestock Water Recycling (Calgary, Alberta) uses its machine learning-enabled nutrient recovery technology (PLANT) and myPLANT data dashboard to digitize food producers’ waste outputs, allowing reduced expenses and environmental impact.
- My Intelligent Machines [MIMs] (Montreal, Quebec) helps life science companies use their big data and AI to maximize food and drug production.
- Possip (Nashville, Tennessee) empowers schools and districts to quickly and routinely hear from their community of families and staff via text message-based pulse checks in over 100 languages.
- Wisy (San Francisco, California) develops technology to bring digital efficiency into the physical world, supporting consumer products businesses and making them thrive in the new economy.
- Zennea Technologies (Vancouver, BC) aims to be the first clinically-proven medical device for chronic snoring and mild obstructive sleep apnea.
In addition to mentorship and technical project support, the accelerator also includes talks and workshops focused on product design, customer acquisition, and leadership development for founders. And to help build lasting professional networks, the cohort will have access to Google executives and successful entrepreneurs like Alison Wagonfeld, Chief Marketing Officer of Google Cloud, and Meg Whitman, CEO of Quibi.
In a Twitter post, Google said: “When more women build their own businesses, economies grow. We’re excited to support female entrepreneurship with our next @Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders class. Learn more about the initiative and the 12 #startups joining us Flag of United StatesFlag of Canada → https://goo.gle/2QLZExY”
When more women build their own businesses, economies grow. We’re excited to support female entrepreneurship with our next @Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders class. Learn more about the initiative and the 12 #startups joining us 🇺🇸🇨🇦 → https://t.co/qv0aT7KwZa pic.twitter.com/TVte6rxrBQ
— Google for Startups (@GoogleStartups) September 1, 2020
